Kevin Willard insulted a reporter and the rest of the Big 5. He and Villanova should be ashamed.
Villanova is looking out for itself, and that's fine. But Kevin Willard's reaction to accurate reporting burned long-established goodwill within the Philadelphia basketball community.
Kevin Willard embarrassed himself and Villanova University on Thursday night. The solace that he and the school’s leaders can take from the episode is that they’re at least getting out of the Big 5, getting what they want, and getting what is best for their men’s basketball program. But the bad taste that Willard left in everyone’s mouth will linger for a long time, and he has no one to blame but himself for quickly becoming a local pariah.
After skipping the Coaches vs. Cancer Preseason Fanfest at the Alan Horowitz Sixth Man Center on Thursday morning, after The Inquirer’s Jeff Neiburg broke the news that Villanova “was not interested” anymore in participating in the Big 5 round robin, Willard took to the microphone after the Wildcats’ exhibition loss to Virginia at Finneran Pavilion and insulted Neiburg for … getting the story right.
He did call some details of Neiburg’s story “false” (even though they weren’t), and he said, “This was not a Villanova thing. … But unfortunately either people are illiterate, which I don’t think they are, or you’re just a bad writer.” Then he went on to confirm the entire point of Neiburg’s reporting: that Villanova — by opting out of the round-robin and scheduling more home games against non-Big 5 programs, some of which would draw bigger crowds — can generate more revenue for itself.
“The other schools wanted us to play on the road every year,” Willard said. “I have to do what’s best for my program.”
» READ MORE: What happened to the Big 5? The decline of Philly basketball’s one-time legendary alliance began a long time ago.
Let’s be clear about something: The issue here with Willard, at least as far as I’m concerned, has nothing to do with Villanova’s decision to leave the Big 5. The city series has been dying a slow, inexorable death over decades for numerous reasons, and given the revenue Villanova can and has to generate to keep up with the rest of the Big East and other national-tier programs, the university is doing what it has to do. The age of local camaraderie coming first is over. A once-great tradition has gone extinct, and it’s a shame, and it’s worth a period of mourning.
But as long as the alumni of Temple, St. Joe’s, La Salle, Penn, and Drexel can’t or won’t fund their programs at a level approximating the level that ’Nova’s alums fund their program, it’s reality.
Villanova is looking out for itself, and in this turbulent and money-only era of quasi-professional athletics, that’s fine. If Willard had owned that decision and merely laid out the reasons for it, only those who think it’s possible to travel back in time would have complained. Instead, he tried to humiliate Neiburg publicly — then ducked the opportunity to speak to him privately after the press conference — for the sake of distracting people from the truth: that everyone at Villanova knows that what Neiburg reported was correct.
What’s more, he torched most if not all of the goodwill between Villanova and the other Big 5 schools that Jay Wright had re-established and Kyle Neptune had maintained. Hell, Wright’s teams won 25 straight Big 5 games, won two national titles, and reached two more Final Fours while the other schools were giddy whenever they happened to qualify for the NCAA Tournament. And he still remained at all times a respected and admired figure within local basketball circles because he appreciated and respected those rivalries and the memories and moments they represented.
Willard could barely be bothered to pay lip service to any of that rich history. Anyone who had followed his career could see this exit coming: He ended Seton Hall’s century-long series with St. Peter’s and wouldn’t have minded if the Pirates’ annual game against Rutgers had gone away. This time, though, he didn’t just decline to cross the bridge. He burned it to ash.
The round-robin format was “stupid,” he said Thursday, and he wasn’t “going to go to La Salle and play in front of 400 people. No, that’s not going to happen.”
His rant was graceless, classless, and betrayed a fundamental refusal to understand the big, rowdy, loyal family that is the Philadelphia basketball community — never mind that he couldn’t even muster the minimal courage to face head-on the ramifications of his program’s actions and the reporter who revealed them.
The last days of the Big 5 were always looming. They didn’t have to be so ugly. The what and why of Villanova’s decision were justifiable and explainable. Kevin Willard botched the how so badly that it will take the end of his tenure before anyone can hope for any healing to begin.
